Ibex Bouldering and a new type of media

Well it's been a long cold winter. We got a bunch of snow earlier in the year, but February was pretty blah as far as snow and skiing. Combine that with my toe injury (from tight climbing shoes) and you get some cabin fever that was driving both of us a bit crazy. Last weekend we opted to finally get out of the house and brave the cold weather to go climbing at Ibex in the west desert of Utah. We recently purchased an HD video camera to allow us to share some of our experiences with everyone more than just with pictures and words. There's something about watching a movie that can really draw you into a place. This first round of video from two days of shooting sure was an eye-opener. I kinda thought that after getting better at taking pictures this whole video thing would come naturally to me. Well that wasn't really the case. Video is waaay harder than simply snapping a few pictures and being reasonably happy with them. Plus the amount of work to come up with a fun video is a lot more time-consuming than cropping and correcting pictures. We took almost two hours of video and came up with about 7 minutes of usable footage. Lots of our shots are quite shaky even with the image stabilization that is automatically applied by the camera. Please forgive some of the bounciness. I think our biggest issue was constantly moving the camera from one subject to another and zooming in the middle of a shot. We shouldn't make that mistake too many more times. Another was simply panning to fast. I was laughing so hard I was almost in tears after watching the footage. It made me very motion sick just to watch a lot of the clips. But luckily after a few hours of editing I think I came up with a final product that will be enjoyable to watch. Both Cassie and I took our turn at the camera and I must say neither of us are naturals. We'll be experimenting with formats and the technology and I'm sure each of our attempts should be worlds better.

Enjoy the world premiere of Matthew and Cassie's first home movie. It's only 8.5 minutes long so don't worry I don't think it'll bore you to death.


Ibex Pictures